Good meditation teachers
often hear this question from their students, and the best answer I
know for it is one that my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, gave every time:

“By being intent on
practicing.”

Each time he gave this
answer, I was struck by how noble and gracious it was. And it wasn't
just a formality. He never tried to find opportunities to pressure his
students for donations. Even when our monastery was poor, he never
acted poor, never tried to take advantage of their gratitude and
trust. This was a refreshing change from some of my previous
experiences with run-of-the-mill village and city monks who were quick
to drop hints about their need for donations from even stray or casual
visitors.

Eventually I learned that
Ajaan Fuang's behavior is common throughout the Forest Tradition. It's
based on a passage in the Pali Canon where the Buddha on his deathbed
states that the highest homage to him is not material homage, but the
homage of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. In
other words, the best way to repay a teacher is to take the Dhamma to
heart and to practice it in a way that fulfills his or her
compassionate purpose in teaching it. I was proud to be part of a
tradition where the inner wealth of this noble idea was actually lived
— where, as Ajaan Fuang often put it, we weren't reduced to hirelings,
and the act of teaching the Dhamma was purely a gift.

So I was saddened when,
on my return to America, I had my first encounters with the dana talk:
the talk on giving and generosity that often comes at the end of a
retreat. The context of the talk — and often the content — makes clear
that it's not a disinterested exercise. It's aimed at generating gifts
for the teacher or the organization sponsoring the retreat, and it
places the burden of responsibility on the retreatants to ensure that
future retreats can occur. The language of the talk is often smooth
and encouraging, but when contrasted with Ajaan Fuang's answer, I
found the sheer fact of the talk ill-mannered and demeaning. If the
organizers and teachers really trusted the retreatants'
good-heartedness, they wouldn't be giving the talk at all. To make
matters worse, the typical dana talk — along with its companion, the
meditation-center fundraising letter — often cites the example of how
monks and nuns are supported in Asia as justification for how dana is
treated here in the West. But they're taking as their example the
worst of the monks, and not the best.

I understand the
reasoning behind the talk. Lay teachers here aspire to the ideal of
teaching for free, but they still need to eat. And, unlike the
monastics of Asia, they don't have a long-standing tradition of dana
to fall back on. So the dana talk was devised as a means for
establishing a culture of dana in a Western context. But as so often
is the case when new customs are devised for Western Buddhism, the
question is whether the dana talk skillfully translates Buddhist
principles into the Western context or seriously distorts them. The
best way to answer this question is to take a close look at those
principles in their original context.

It's well known that dana
lies at the beginning of Buddhist practice. Dana, quite literally, has
kept the Dhamma alive. If it weren't for the Indian tradition of
giving to mendicants, the Buddha would never have had the opportunity
to explore and find the path to Awakening. The monastic sangha
wouldn't have had the time and opportunity to follow his way. Dana is
the first teaching in the graduated discourse: the list of topics the
Buddha used to lead listeners step-by-step to an appreciation of the
four noble truths, and often from there to their own first taste of
Awakening. When stating the basic principles of karma, he would begin
with the statement, “There is what is given.”

What's less well known is
that in making this statement, the Buddha was not dealing in obvious
truths or generic platitudes, for the topic of giving was actually
controversial in his time. For centuries, the brahmans of India had
been extolling the virtue of giving — as long as the gifts were given
to them. Not only that, gifts to brahmans were obligatory. People of
other castes, if they didn't concede to the brahmans' demands for
gifts, were neglecting their most essential social duty. By ignoring
their duties in the present life, such people and their relatives
would suffer hardship both now and after death.

As might be expected,
this attitude produced a backlash. Several of the samana, or
contemplative, movements of the Buddha's time countered the brahmans'
claims by asserting that there was no virtue in giving at all. Their
arguments fell into two camps. One camp claimed that giving carried no
virtue because there was no afterlife. A person was nothing more than
physical elements that, at death, returned to their respective
spheres. That was it. Giving thus provided no long-term results. The
other camp stated that there was no such thing as giving, for
everything in the universe has been determined by fate. If a donor
gives something to another person, it's not really a gift, for the
donor has no choice or free will in the matter. Fate was simply
working itself out.

So when the Buddha, in
his introduction to the teaching on karma, began by saying that there
is what is given, he was repudiating both camps. Giving does
give results both now and on into the future, and it is the
result of the donor's free choice. However, in contrast to the
brahmans, the Buddha took the principle of freedom one step further.
When asked where a gift should be given, he stated simply, “Wherever
the mind feels inspired.” In other words — aside from repaying one's
debt to one's parents — there is no obligation to give. This means
that the choice to give is an act of true freedom, and thus the
perfect place to start the path to total release.

This is why the Buddha
adopted dana as the context for practicing and teaching the Dhamma.
But — to maintain the twin principles of freedom and fruitfulness in
giving — he created a culture of dana that embodied particularly
Buddhist ideals. To begin with, he defined dana not simply as material
gifts. The practice of the precepts, he said, was also a type of dana
— the gift of universal safety, protecting all beings from the harm of
one's unskillful actions — as was the act of teaching the Dhamma. This
meant that lavish giving was not just the prerogative of the rich.
Secondly, he formulated a code of conduct to produce an attitude
toward giving that would benefit both the donors and the recipients,
keeping the practice of giving both fruitful and free.

We tend not to associate
codes of conduct with the word “freedom,” but that's because we forget
that freedom, too, needs protection, especially from the attitude that
wants to be free in its choices but feels insecure when others are
free in theirs. The Buddha's codes of conduct are voluntary — he never
coerced anyone into practicing his teachings — but once they are
adopted, they require the cooperation of both sides to keep them
effective and strong.

These codes are best
understood in terms of the six factors that the Buddha said
exemplified the ideal gift:

“The donor, before
giving, is glad; while giving, his/her mind is inspired; and after
giving, is gratified. These are the three factors of the donor…

“The recipients are
free of passion or are practicing for the subduing of passion; free
of aversion or practicing for the subduing of aversion; and free of
delusion or practicing for the subduing of delusion. These are the
three factors of the recipients.”

Although this passage
seems to suggest that each side is responsible only for the factors on
its side, the Buddha's larger etiquette for generosity shows that the
responsibility for all six factors — and in particular, the three
factors of the donor — is shared. And this shared responsibility
flourishes best in an atmosphere of mutual trust.

For the donors, this
means that if they want to feel glad, inspired, and gratified at their
gift, they should not see the gift as payment for personal services
rendered by individual monks or nuns. That would turn the gift into
wages, and deprive it of its emotional power. Instead, they'd be wise
to look for trustworthy recipients: people who are training — or have
trained — their minds to be cleaned and undefiled. They should also
give their gift in a respectful way so that the act of giving will
reinforce the gladness that inspired it, and will inspire the
recipient to value their gift.

The responsibilities of
the recipients, however, are even more stringent. To ensure that the
donor feels glad before giving, monks and nuns are forbidden from
pressuring the donor in any way. Except when ill or in situations
where the donor has invited them to ask, they cannot ask for anything
beyond the barest emergency necessities. They are not even allowed to
give hints about what they'd like to receive. When asked where a
prospective gift should be given, they are told to follow the Buddha's
example and say, “Give wherever your gift would be used, or would be
well-cared for, or would last long, or wherever your mind feels
inspired.” This conveys a sense of trust in the donor's discernment —
which in itself is a gift that gladdens the donor's mind.

To ensure that a donor
feels inspired while giving a gift, the monks and nuns are enjoined to
receive gifts attentively and with an attitude of respect. To ensure
that the donor feels gratified afterward, they should live frugally,
care for the gift, and make sure it is used in an appropriate way. In
other words, they should show that the donor's trust in them is well
placed. And of course they must work on subduing their greed, anger,
and delusion. In fact, this is a primary motivation for trying to
attain arahantship: so that the gifts given to one will bear the
donors great fruit.

By sharing these
responsibilities in an atmosphere of trust, both sides protect the
freedom of the donor. They also foster the conditions that will enable
not only the practice of generosity but also the entire practice of
Dhamma to flourish and grow.

The principles of freedom
and fruitfulness also govern the code the Buddha formulated
specifically for protecting the gift of Dhamma. Here again, the
responsibilities are shared. To ensure that the teacher is glad,
inspired, and gratified in teaching, the listeners are advised to
listen with respect, to try to understand the teaching, and — once
they're convinced that it's genuinely wise — to sincerely put it into
practice so as to gain the desired results. Like a monk or nun
receiving a material gift, the recipient of the gift of Dhamma has the
simple responsibility of treating the gift well.

The teacher, meanwhile,
must make sure not to regard the act of teaching as a repayment of a
debt. After all, monks and nuns repay their debt to their lay donors
by trying to rid their minds of greed, aversion, and delusion. They
are in no way obligated to teach, which means that the act of teaching
is a gift free and clear. In addition, the Buddha insisted that the
Dhamma be taught without expectation of material reward. When he was
once offered a “teacher's fee” for his teaching, he refused to accept
it and told the donor to throw it away. He also established the
precedent that when a monastic teaches the rewards of generosity, the
teaching is given after a gift has been given, not before, so that the
stain of hinting won't sully what's said.

All of these principles
assume a high level of nobility and restraint on both sides of the
equation, which is why people tried to find ways around them even
while the Buddha was alive. The origin stories to the monastic
discipline — the tales portraying the misbehavior that led the Buddha
to formulate rules for the monks and nuns — often tell of monastics
whose gift of Dhamma came with strings attached, and of lay people who
gladly pulled those strings to get what they wanted out of the
monastics: personal favors served with an ingratiating smile. The
Buddha's steady persistence in formulating rules to cut these strings
shows how determined he was that the principle of Dhamma as a
genuinely free gift not be an idle ideal. He wanted it to influence
the way people actually behaved.

He never gave an extended
explanation of why the act of teaching should always be a gift, but he
did state in general terms that when his code of conduct became
corrupt over time, that would corrupt the Dhamma as well. And in the
case of the etiquette of generosity, this principle has been borne out
frequently throughout Buddhist history.

A primary example is
recorded in the Apadanas, which scholars believe were added to the
Canon after King Asoka's time. The Apadanas discuss the rewards of
giving in a way that shows how eager the monks composing them were to
receive lavish gifts. They promise that even a small gift will bear
fruit as guaranteed arahantship many eons in the future, and that the
path from now to then will always be filled with pleasure and
prestige. Attainments of special distinction, though, require special
donations. Some of these donations bear a symbolic resemblance to the
desired distinction — a gift of lighted lamps, for instance, presages
clairvoyance — but the preferred gift of distinction was a week's
worth of lavish meals for an entire monastery, or at least for the
monks who teach.

It's obvious that the
monks who composed the Apadanas were giving free rein to their greed,
and were eager to tell their listeners what their listeners wanted to
hear. The fact that these texts were recorded for posterity shows that
the listeners, in fact, were pleased. Thus the teachers and their
students, acting in collusion, skewed the culture of dana in the
direction of their defilements. In so doing they distorted the Dhamma
as well. If gift-giving guarantees Awakening, it supplants the noble
eightfold path with the one-fold path of the gift. If the road to
Awakening is always prestigious and joyful, the concept of right
effort disappears. Yet once these ideas were introduced into the
Buddhist tradition, they gained the stamp of authority and have
affected Buddhist practice ever since. Throughout Buddhist Asia,
people tend to give gifts with an eye to their symbolic promise of
future reward; and the list of gifts extolled in the Apadanas reads
like a catalog of the gifts placed on altars throughout Buddhist Asia
even today.

Which goes to show that
once the culture of dana gets distorted, it can distort the practice
of Dhamma as a whole for many centuries. So if we're serious about
bringing the culture of dana to the West, we should be very careful to
ensure that our efforts honor the principles that make dana a
genuinely Buddhist practice. This means no longer using the tactics of
modern fundraising to encourage generosity among retreatants or
Buddhists in general. It also means rethinking the dana talk, for on
many counts it fails the test. In pressuring retreatants to give to
teachers, it doesn't lead to gladness before giving, and instead
sounds like a plea for a tip at the end of a meal. The frequent
efforts to pull on the retreatants' heartstrings as a path to their
purse strings betray a lack of trust in their thoughtfulness and leave
a bad taste. And the entire way dana is handled for teachers doesn't
escape the fact that it's payment for services rendered. Whether
teachers think about this consciously or not, it pressures them subtly
to tell their listeners what they think their listeners want to hear.
The Dhamma can't help but suffer as a result.

The ideal solution would
be to provide a framework whereby serious Dhamma practitioners could
be supported whether or not they taught. That way, the act of teaching
would be a genuine gift. In the meantime, though, a step in the
direction of a genuine culture of dana would be to declare a
moratorium on all dana talks at the end of retreats, and on references
to the Buddhist tradition of dana in fundraising appeals, so as to
give the word time to recover its dignity.

On retreats, dana could
be discussed in a general way, in the context of the many Dhamma talks
given on how best to integrate Dhamma practice in daily life. At the
end of the retreat, a basket could be left out for donations, with a
note that the teacher hasn't been paid to teach the retreat. That's
all. No appeals for mercy. No flashcards. Sensitive retreatants will
be able to put two and two together, and will feel glad, inspired, and
gratified that they were trusted to do the math for themselves.

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